174 SPIRITS AID BY OUR OWN MAGNETISM. This condition, instead of decreasing, was on the in · crease. In the winter after I had found out that my parents were really alive in a natural way, and were sometimes close at hand, I found that if I read in the "Banner of Light," or in some such book as "Esoteric Christianity," after retiring, I became tranquillized, and could get asleep, though all previous reading had made me more wakeful. The next summer I began the magnetic process herein described, and my spirit friends were thus enabled to aid me more effectually. The insomnia of twenty-three years' standing has been removed, and a wakeful condition has become a rare exception, instead of the standing rule as it was during all these years. My sleepless friend, you cannot be worse off in this regard than was I. If I could be cured, so can you, if you will persistently practice the same methods. First, you want to practice the magnetic process, until your magnetized condition has calmed and strengthened your nervous system, and has opened an avenue by which unseen helpers can reach yon, and blend their celestial magnetism with your own. After attaining this condition, you can soon be aided by them. While you are yourself not magnetic, your dearest friends in spirit life may long to aid you, but it is impossible for them to do so; for it is magnetic currents, and they alone, that enable them to reach you. I will tell you the simple process that has been so effectual in my own case. Of course I take the magnetic process before retiring, for I never commit myself to rest till I have harmonized my body with the currents of terrestrial magnetism, and my soul with the higher powers. Perhaps, HOW MY MOTHER PUTS ME TO SLEEP. 175 after going to bed, I engage in some interesting train of thought, or plan some future work, and think too long. Or, I have at sometime during the past day been brought in contact with some inharmonious person, who has in some weak hour of mine been able to unsettle the tranquil flow of my inner being, and I live over again their words or the circumstances that gave me pain. I find myself becoming restless, and the old shocks to my nervous system, which once led to a sleepless night, begin to recur. I see all my danger, and take the following course. I lie flat on my back in an attitude of complete rest, make myself perfectly passive (a thing I could not do in the old days, but have learned to do by practicing the First Step), and say, "Some good spirit friend, tell my mother that I cannot sleep. Ask her to come, and bring spirits with her, and plenty of magnetism. I am sorry to trouble her, but I need her so much." In a minute or so, when she has had time for the message to reach her wherever she may be engaged in the spirit world, and has come on the wings of love to aid her earth daughter, I stretch my arms up to the world above. I feel magnetic currents, and my own magnetism is the roadway by which theirs can blend with mine, and they magnetize me so thoroughly that I at once fall asleep and have a good night's rest. If I had not become somewhat magnetic to begin with (by training) my friends could not reach me, but they use my own currents, as a starter, and their own powerful currents complete the work. Of course the control over my own mental processes, acquired by the same training, is an equally essential factor in the result. In this age of increasing spirituality there are many 176 DEFECTS IN SOME RECENT SCHOOLS. schools, many methods for development, all of which are like different pearls strung on the same one golden thread of keeping the body under the soul. Some of these "spiritual" and "mental" schools, while accomplishing much good, are yet defective. They are imperfect in that they lay all the stress and all the efforts in the mind itself, some going so far as to say that "Spirit is the only substance," thus contradicting the grand truth that spirit and matter exist together. They ignore the fact that we have a body, two bodies in fact, one more ethereal than the other. Of course there is no room in their system for magnetic currents or any forces in nature that can affect us. They claim that we are wholly independent of anything of the sort. They are thus still wrapped in the swaddling clothes of the old theology. That system claims that when the soul leaves the body it is wholly beyond all the laws of nature, its heavenly body, if it has one, having nothing whatever to do with them or with anything connected with the forces of the material world. Some of these new systems claim that even while we live here, we have virtually no body, have nothing to do with forces in nature, and may become as independent of earthly things now as they fancy we shall be after the change called death. The rational view is the true one: that we have a fleshly body now, that its well-being is promoted by its being in harmony with natural forces; that we have at the same time a more ethereal body, whose well-being and fitness for being the only covering of the soul by and by are promoted then and now by the same means; and that our soul, our true self, manifests itself to others by these atomic forms of different degrees of density. LIFE LASTS, THOUGH FORMS CHANGE. 177 How beautiful is the correlation between our different forms of existence! As Paul said, "First that which is natural (physical), and afterward that which is spiritual." Not that we are all physical at first, and the spiritual part of us superinduced later; but we are physical and spiritual from our first independent consciousness: the physical at first seems more apparent, and, as it sloughs off, the finer part remains and will long remain as a body to the really immortal soul. That will endure forever. Its manifestations may disappear, in many planets, in many worlds, but "the thing in itself" is immortal. "The Spirit-world around this world of sense, LONGFELLOW. CHAPTER XVIII. THE MENTAL AND PHYSICAL STEPS COMBINED. The former part of this book gave in detail the five mental steps, and we have just described the five physical ones: it remains to show how to blend them together, so that the double being, composed of soul on the one hand, and the two differing bodies on the other hand, may develop equally and harmoniously together. The number of steps is the same in each, and while we are taking each mental one, it is accompanied by its corresponding one in the physical. It will be here appropriate to say that each physical one expresses in action the very thing that the mind is then seeking to do, and that this action is all the while training the mind to do what it perhaps could not do before. Some have asked me why the process cannot be done wholly in the mind, leaving the body quiescent. The reasons are two. Being still in the body, and the mind being untrained in voluntarily taking the successive mental states, it is greatly aided in learning to do so by making the body, the servant, say what the inner part endeavors to do. That is one reason. The other is that the physical steps do actually throw off our personal inharmonious currents, actually result in our being magnetized, and in retaining that condition for a considerable period, as truly as that magnetism is induced in a bar of soft iron by being brought in contact |